WORSHIP

Selected Sermons

“Shall These Bones Live ”
By David W. Miller
Fifth Sunday of Lent - March 9, 2008

Ezekiel 37:1-14

“The valley of the dry bones.” What are we to make of this eerie vision of Ezekiel, the priest of Yahweh turned prophet, in the darkest days of the Hebrew nation’s history: the capture of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, the exile of her leading citizens, and the destruction of the Temple? Like other prophets, Ezekiel probably had his visions in what today we would call an altered state of consciousness – a trance. But the setting of this vision was an objective reality. The remains of a defeated army deliberately left exposed by the victors that their flesh might be rotted by the sun and consumed by the wolves and the vultures was no doubt a relatively familiar sight to travelers in the ancient Near East. It reflected a determination to ensure that one’s adversary was not only defeated but humiliated: subjected to the most shameful possible treatment, so that the victor himself might enjoy all the more the glory and honor to which his victory entitled him.

The connotations of that word “honor” were all positive for most of us when we were growing up. “Honor” meant telling the truth, not cheating on exams, fulfilling one’s obligations and showing due respect to others. But to social scientists who have studied various societies in the past and in the present, “honor” can have very negative implications ranging from deadly feuds triggered by trivial insults to gang-rapes and other atrocities against women that have recently been labeled “honor killings” by the news media. Christianity has had problems with the culture of honor from the very beginning. When, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus advised his followers “Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also” (Matt. 5:39) he was directly contradicting the culture of honor and shame that prevailed throughout the entire Mediterranean world: to allow such an insult to go unavenged was to concede that the man who had slapped you was entitled to greater honor in the social pecking-order than you.

A major problem for early Christians was the ridicule of their neighbors for worshiping someone who had died the most humiliating death imaginable. An important strain of the Apostle Paul’s letters can be understood as advice as to how answer such derision. Christianity’s replacement of classical paganism as the Roman Empire’s official religion – followed by that Empire’s collapse – left the Church in the awkward position of sharing authority with feudal lords who owed their power to their military resources. During the High Middle Ages churchmen tried various means to deter lords and their knights from recurrent violence over who would dominate the local hierarchy of honor and power. However, by the late Middle Ages clergymen were all too often drawn into the violence themselves, and chaplains might be valued as much for their supposed ability to enlist the Almighty in the cause of their patron as for their provision of spiritual services to the troops. 1 It is no wonder that in the Middle Ages the Church identified “Pride” as the deadliest of the seven deadly sins.

The rise of the modern state, the appearance of what we today call “civil society,” and the emergence of elites whose members’ status depended more on commerce and skills than upon their dominance of territory by force of arms: all these developments diminished the influence of the old honor culture on ordinary interpersonal relations. By the nineteenth century in Western Europe and North America that culture seemed to be confined mainly to the continued but diminishing practice of dueling among what liberal society regarded as retrograde elements, like military officers and slaveholders. However, liberal satisfaction with the progressive character of modern society was premature. The events of 1914 to 1945 demonstrated that the honor culture was not in remission but had metastasized into a concept of “national honor” that now seems to some of our countrymen to require our nation – like the insulted duelist –to expend boundless blood and treasure in order to bring our troops home from Iraq with honor rather than defeat.

Before I proceed further, let me say that I do certainly recognize the moral ambiguities that surround many choices over whether or not a particular evil justifies war. In a conversation at 10 Downing Street in March of 1941, James Conant, the President of Harvard, noted that many Americans thought that “nothing was worse than war,”and another guest, Lady Portarlington, expressed agreement with that point of view. Thereupon Prime Minister Churchill turned upon her, declaiming, “Slavery is worse than war. Dishonour is worse than war.” 2 My own view is that Churchill was half right: Yes, slavery is worse than war and its abolition in our country was worth the huge loss of life in the American Civil War. But dishonor is another matter altogether.

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How should we, twenty-first century Christians, make sense of Yahweh’s promise: “I am going to open your graves and lift you out of the graves”? Traditionally Christian interpreters of this text have taken it as evidence for the doctrine of bodily resurrection: that every individual believer who dies will later experience the restoration of his or her physical body as did the crucified Jesus. This doctrine poses some problems for students of modern biochemistry, not to mention folks like myself whose bodies are not in particularly good shape to begin with. Once we understand, however, that Ezekiel’s prophecy is a vision and a parable – not a claim that a miracle occurred in a literal valley of dry bones – we may gain a new perspective on the meaning of the resurrection of our Lord.

Once Yahweh had gotten the prophet’s attention with the vision, what did he tell Ezekiel to tell the Hebrew people? First, Ezekiel is not told to promise them glory and honor – the thrill of victory over their adversaries. No, he is told to promise them two things: first, life and, second, return to their own soil. Of course the Hebrew people, as opposed to the skeletons in the vision, were not dead. The resurrection they are being promised is not a literal return to life but some dramatic transformation of that life. The character of that transformation is revealed in the second half of the promise: “return to their own soil.” The predicament of Ezekiel’s audience is the brokenness of their community: the leaders of the Hebrew nation (including Ezekiel himself) are in captivity in Babylon while ordinary people are still back in Palestine. Resurrection (in this case anyway) is the experience of a community rather than of so-and-so many individuals. And by the way – attention: actual historical fact coming – Ezekiel’s prophecy is fulfilled some fifty years later when Cyrus the Persian captures Babylon and allows displaced peoples, including the Jews, to return to their homelands.

As Mary Louise indicated last Sunday, resurrection is a matter of turning the world upside-down. That surely is how we understand the resurrection of Christ: our Savior overcomes the power of sin and death to usher in a world that the meek will inherit. The resurrection promised to the Hebrew nation through Ezekiel was an important step toward that resurrection because it freed them, at least on the national level, from bondage to the culture of honor. The days of Joshua, David and Solomon were gone forever. No longer could the Judeans reasonably aspire to sovereign hegemony even over the whole of Palestine, nor expect victories over enemies far more daunting than the Philistines and the Moabites had ever been. For the next six centuries they would be relegated to a very minor role in the geopolitics of the Near East. The real struggle for glory and honor would be carried out among the great empires: Babylonian versus Assyrian, Persian versus Babylonian, Hellenistic versus Persian, Roman versus Hellenistic. And implicitly Yahweh, speaking through Ezekiel, had said that was OK. That was another way of turning the world upside-down.

So what relevance does the valley of dry bones have for us American Christians today? The Hebrew nation was an insignificant player in the great power game of classical antiquity; the United States today is the world’s only surviving superpower. The contexts of these strikingly different situations are also strikingly different. The geopolitics of classical antiquity remained a brutal game of honor and shame. Local rulers defeated by the Roman Army were taken to Rome to be paraded through the streets and tortured on their way to the most humiliating executions that could be devised. By contrast, a major theme in 20th-century history was the effort of Christian statesmen like Woodrow Wilson and Dag Hammarskjöld (one of whose poems the choir will sing in a few minutes) to end the deadly spectacle of honor and shame in the affairs of nations through such institutions as the League of Nations and the United Nations. Arguably a great deal of progress toward that goal has been made. A number of the countries that participated with us in the two World Wars of the twentieth century now reject the culture of honor and shame as a basis for international relations, but important voices in our nation’s polity mock them as “Old Europe.”

Such voices are calling for the dry bones to be bleached and scattered in the sand. But those bones will live. For the hand of God is upon us, and our risen Lord grants us in His resurrection a world turned upside down, where the losers shall be the winners, where the shamed and excluded shall leap for joy, where the peacemakers will no longer be called cowards and traitors but will be known as the children of God.

Thanks be to God.

Bowman, James. Honor : A History. 1st ed. New York: Encounter Books, 2006.

Churchill, Winston Sir, and Martin Gilbert. The Churchill War Papers. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993.

Pitt-Rivers, Julian. "Honour and Social Status." In Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, edited by Jean G. Peristiany, 19-77. Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1966.

Thiery, Daniel E. "Plowshares and Swords: Clerical Involvement in Acts of Violence and Peacemaking in Late Medieval England, C. 1400-1536." Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 36, no. 2 (2004): 201-22.

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1 Daniel E. Thiery, “Plowshares and Swords: Clerical Involvement in Acts of Violence and

   Peacemaking in Late Medieval England, c. 1400-1536,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal

   Concerned with British Studies, 36, no. 2 (2004): 201-22.

2 Winston Churchill and Martin Gilbert, The Churchill War Papers, 1st ed. (New York:

    W.W. Norton, 1993), iii, 322